The invention relates to the development of a telecommunications-based, time-management solution for knowledge workers. It involves the creation and implementation of software for tracking, analyzing, and presenting in a visually compelling manner the volumes and directional flows of electronic communication within and among organizations and between individuals. Potential uses of the software solution in various aspects of the business include, but are not limited to, supply-chain management, project management, customer- and partner-relationship management, as well as human-resources management. Managers can also use the content gathered by the solution in an emerging area of knowledge management—the automatic recording of tacit knowledge to help identify persons in the organization with expertise, information, or contacts relevant to particular projects or problems.
Monitoring communication-traffic patterns in a visual format is not new. However, doing so for the purpose of business management is. Unlike the present invention, the systems to date have tracked and graphed communication flows primarily as a way to optimize network performance and, for example, avoid traffic congestion and bottlenecks.
In today's world of informational overload, attention has become the scarcest and most valuable resource. An increasing amount of time is devoted to various forms of remote electronic communication (i.e. telecommunication) as ever advancing technology and declining costs cause the volume of such communication to rise exponentially. However, no systems are in place to automatically measure and thereby assess how and to what extent members of geographically dispersed organizations use their time and that of others in this important component of the workday.
For years, companies like Nielsen TM have monitored the amount of time that people spend watching TV and now more recently have tracked the amount of time they spend on the Internet. Nevertheless, few if any firms measure the amount of time that employees spend via remote communication in conducting business: on the phone, through e-mail, or videoconference. Today's communications revolution permits work from anywhere at anytime. As the mobility of workers increase, face-to-face interaction declines, and remote communication constitutes an ever-growing percent of interaction with one's colleagues, business partners, suppliers, and customers. For strategic reasons and business performance, it is important to know more about the nature of this communication and its effect on corporate objectives.
To illustrate one application of this invention, an automated, telecommunications-based, time-management system can replace or supplement traditional and more cumbersome activity-based costing (ABC) management systems. As both the percent of knowledge workers within the workforce and the variety of their daily tasks increase, existing activity-based management systems are incapable of adequately tracking the ever-changing nature of their work. No one day is like another, so ABC measures lose their meaning in trying to assign overhead costs to particular customers or products.
Unlike activity-based costing, which requires laborious observation, telecommunication-based costing of activities provides much of the same information at much less cost, in real time, and across organizations: for example, in extended supply chains reaching from the supplier's supplier to the customer's customer. It requires no employee input or training and should be much simpler to implement than activity-based costing, particularly with widely dispersed knowledge workers and executives who handle an ever-changing variety of tasks. Some companies have developed “automated” ABC systems, but the systems still require the users to input data or key in each activity code as it begins.
FIG. 5 of the specification shows a typical automated ABC management system. It is described in detail here as background and referred to again in the specification as an example of how the present invention can be applied to address a specific business problem. In this illustration of the prior art, system 70 of FIG. 5 is used by a business organization that employs people and equipment to provide services or produce products. At the center of the system 70 is a relational database 72 with organized data structures containing raw business data 74 and processed activity-cost information 76. Having access to the relational database 72 are data processing modules 78, including, for example, a people module 80, an equipment module 82, a facility module 84, and an overhead module 86 to process and determine the costs applicable to the activities performed in the organization. There are at least two data input sources to the relational database 72, including automated system inputs from an existing computer system or mainframe 90 through an interface 92. The data automatically imported or downloaded from the existing computer 90 contains general-ledger data 94, production-measurement-system data 96, and human-resources-system data 98. This accounting data may reside on a data storage device in the form of a database.
Another data source to the relational database 72 is user input on a workstation 100 through a graphical user interface (GUI) 102. The type of information entered by the user in this manner may include an identification of employees in specific management organizations, employee-activity information, equipment- and space-utilization information, and product information.
The automated activity-based management system 70 also includes an on-line reporting feature 110, which may generate predefined or user-defined reports on a periodic basis or on demand. Such reports may contain trend, forecast, benchmark, site-comparison, standard-service, activity-output, matrix, quality, and value-added reports.
Traditionally, a business organization makes decisions and strategies based on the general-ledger data 94, production-measurement-system data 96, and human-resources-system data 98 that the organization generates and maintains in the course of its business. The automated activity-based management system 70 takes this traditional accounting information, along with some additional business information provided by the user, and allocates monetary costs to specific activities performed. Whereas a traditional general-ledger view of a computer network's operational business unit maps money spent to salaries, hardware, software, maintenance, and space, an activity-based management view maps these same expenditures to activities previously lumped under the heading of “overhead” such as network surveillance, network testing, technical assistance, problem resolution, vendor interaction, and configuration changes. Activity-based management thus provides a more detailed, realistic, and operational view of how money is spent in an organization. This concludes the detailed descriptive background of the purpose, design, and operation of a typical automated ABC management system.
In addition to improving the accuracy and completeness of automated and non-automated ABC management systems, the present invention can also supplement and improve on job-costing techniques currently used by professionals like lawyers or consultants. These knowledge workers bill their services in as frequent as six-minute intervals, but often must reconstruct at the end of the day how they spent their time. Some may use semi-automated time-tracking software. Such software packages, however, typically measure time usage only for those categories of employees with billable hours and do not indicate the organizational processes and patterns of interactions that consume time.
Traditionally, companies have had outgoing phone logs and may have monitored them to ensure that employees were only making authorized long-distance calls. Today, with digital phone identification, it is now possible to have records of incoming calls, too. As an apparently free resource, e-mail use has skyrocketed, but companies have monitored it primarily to maintain network quality or to control the types of content transmitted. Since the time devoted to telephone calls and e-mail represents a cost to firms, telecommunications use via Internet, wireless-phone, or fixed-line systems should be monitored and analyzed to optimize the amount of time that such use consumes. Managers can manage only what they can measure. This system of time measurement is therefore designed to facilitate better management.
A search of the prior art shows no service or product currently in use for the intended application. The industry for better measuring and managing people's level of attention has not yet developed in business-to-business intranets and extranets, and is in its infancy in the business-to-consumer Internet of online advertising metrics.